What was there beneath the ooze

Sure. Who could guess it? An ordinary little pond a mile off the Missouri, for sure part of an old ox-bow. Undistinguished. Forgettable. Who could have imagined that buried somewhere under sedimentary layers of mud and goop there existed, well-preserved too, a 161-foot steamship, loaded to the gills with 250 tons of goods?

March 18, 1865, a week after Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term and a week General Robert E. Lee's mounted one last offensive in Virginia; on March 18, 1865, the steamboat Bertrand departed St. Louis on a treacherous trek, as all of them were, up the wide Missouri, the country's longest river, stem to stern, from St. Louie to Fort Benton, Montana Territory, where, rumor had it, gold, all kinds of it, was waiting to be rescued like shimmering damsel in distress.

The Missouri River was a hornet's nest of tipped cottonwoods that created river swirls so deep and frothy they sunk steamships like the Bertrand, no matter how long or how grand. Think I'm kidding?--the average lifespan of a steamer in the era was three short years. Going up or down made no difference, navigating the Missouri took luck and pluck and more than a little grace. But gold fields--just the sound of that phrase--made taking on all those cottonwoods and wily river the kind of gamble lots of folks wanted a hand in. 

At Omaha the Bertrand beefed up its already abundant cargo, then sat there waiting for the river to rise. When it did, they left, north once again but got just 25 miles upstream before some monster cottonwood snagged the monster and crumpled it up like cardboard. In ten minutes the Bertrand went down. Fifty or sixty passengers scampered off, no lives lost; but the Bertrand, just a year old, got itself retired right then and there.

Down and lost right there before a century of mud and dirt oozed over it while the fickle river grew good and sick of the old channel, and, with a flood or two to move elsewhere, without the Bertrand. So the wreck stayed there until two Omaha salvagers, Sam Corbino and Jesse Pursell, tried to determine its location, put down feelers into the ooze that sealed it, and, voila, found it--200,000 artifacts, leftover cargo impossibly well-preserved in all that ooze, 150 tons of salvageable goods.

No gold, of course, but a buried treasure nonetheless. The story all that cargo told was a story otherwise told only on the printed page. What did gold-seekers need to strike it rich, beside the gold that is? How did they outfit all those fortune-hunters on their mighty enterprise? 

Well, weights and measures and ledger books to keep track of the winnings, and mortar and pestles and mercury flasks, but only a few--salvagers long ago must have taken the bulk of them. Powder kegs and a host of mining shovels, enough for a crowd and more. And boots, buffalo boots for cold Montana winters. And, maybe you can make it out back there--bottles of ketchup and ink and ale-- 

and medicinal (of course) bitters, 

and corkscrews to get at all that good stuff.

Oh, and cannon balls for some distant war.

and cowbells--oh, essentials of the good life.

What Corbina and Pursell discovered when they washed away all that mud was nothing more or less than an mirror of what we were--and are, too, a museum of goods that tells us a story, our story.

Nice of Big Muddy to hold all those treasures in store, don't you think? She could be a beast sometimes, I guess, but then just occasionally she showed a heart of gold.

For sure, go to De Soto Bend to see the wildlife, thousands of migratory birds; but while you're there, don't miss stopping by the Bertrand display, where you can't help but think you won't simply see something of the gold rush, but also--look closely!--something of yourself.